Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Now Hotmail also gets IE9 jumplist

One of the coolest feature of IE9 is the pinned sites. That is, you can launch your favorite web pages from your task bar with a single click, so the web sites are like any other app with jumplist on your taskbar. Now web sites are taking advantage of this feature and designing their sites to provide links and even player controls.

When IE9 beta was released ,they had demo examples of Hotmail being pinned to taskbar. But at that time Hotmail jumplist was not available to users. Now it has been updated and Hotmail also has jumplist. As you can see it includes Inbox, Calendars, Contacts, Send email.

To pin the Hotmail to your taskbar, Sign-in to Hotmail, click the Hotmail favicon (icon to the left of the web address in the address bar) and drag it to the taskbar. Do this while in Inbox, sometimes if you are in Hotmail Home Page, it may not work correctly. Once the icon is dragged to taskbar, Right click on it to get the jumplist. Remember if you have saved the password and when you click the icon later, the Hotmail will open . So its upto you to make Hotmail ‘Remember password ‘ or not.

The same thing when I tried with Gmail, got this -

Gmail not yet taking advantage of this cool feature. May be in future it may also provide it.

Also note that once you pin any site/Hotmail to the taskbar and when you open it, the website icon appears at the top of the browser, so you have easy access to the website home page. The Back and forward buttons also gets the color to match the color of the icon. Very cool !